Background to GNA

Background to GNA

The Global Names Architecture was developed to help nomenclaturalists, taxonomists and biodiversity informaticians do their jobs better and faster.  The appearance of projects that used a names-based solutions to organizing information especially wanted good names management to provide the means of indexing information.  Classifications were seen as structures that can be used to navigate around the indexed information and to discover or browse the associated content.

The use of names to organize information is not simple.  There are two major problems: that of many-names-for-one-species, and the other of one-name-for-many-species.

ABRS in Australia recently reassessed the global biodiversity at 1,900,000 species.  To this we might add about 250,000 extinct species and a similar number of genera and other higher taxa. But, as the names index (at gni.globalnames.org) will attest, there are many more names than there are species (it knows of almost 20,000,000 names).